Crowns: My Hair, Soul, Freedom

Sandro Miller is a 60-year-old Caucasian male with ancestral roots in Italy, Germany, and America. He is married to a most beautiful 47-year-old Black woman, ClaudeAline Nazaire, whose ancestral roots are in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and America. His beautiful wife was the inspiration for this photographic project, a documentation of the creative, prideful, and personally expressive reality that announces Black heritage and Black tradition. The author shared the pointed, upbeat ideal of Black self-expression and idealization. He documented body art and many unspoken ways in which Black women declare their freedom – by choice and sensibility – by sculpting their managed, structured hair. Each portrait in this project recognizes and honors women’s inventive power and beauty while celebrating, at the same time, their social endurance and cultural memory – the triumph of biology and genetics.